i had a brilliant spark wouldn't it be cool if some one made a steam engine that was fully animated
for example you press bell the bell sways and when you adjust the reverser the valve gear moves in accordance
I don't think your second proposal would be possible to animate, but it would definately be possible to animate some of the other things, such as bells.
Well we had some discussion on animating valve gear position to reflect reverse lever setting a while back in the forum. The jury is still out but I'm fairly certain it can be done. Changing the relative starting positions of the parts of an animated mesh isn't possible in Trainz once the sequence is set up. So it will require something quite a bit different from the usual animation methods. It should be possible though to create a number of different sets of attached animated meshes reflecting different reverse lever settings and swap them in and out under script control. There were a couple of methods proposed that are rather complicated and involve a large number of seperate animations. No ones even done a proof of concept yet and the work involved is considerable. Because of that it probably won't be a smooth change from one position to another but rather a coarse jump which happens in real time as we watch so the effect might not be a great as we hope but it would definitely reflect the new valve gear motion after the change takes place. Maybe someday but I'd guess not soon.
